The Nine

by C. M. Stunich

  Even though I knew it was risky, I decided to throw up an illusion, this massive mountain growing between us from the stone courtyard. As I'd thought, Revel ran straight through it and I ducked down, sending her flying over my head and rolling across the ground. She came up quick, but I was on my way to another illusion, this time blooming a large cherry tree in front of the possessed woman.

  Once again, she went through the illusion, but I'd thrown a trip wire across its non-existent roots, a thread of magic that wrapped around Revel's body and lifted her straight up into the air. She slashed at the vines, cutting them loose, but as soon as she crashed back to the ground, I lifted my hand up, drew a sigil of binding and locked her in place with my magic. I hadn't had much of a chance to use it before the kitsune-tsukai had sealed my powers away, but holy fuck, was I strong.

  It was said that with each tail a kitsune gained, their power increased by a thousandfold. Never had that felt more true than it did right then. At the same time, I was concerned about using my unbound tails. I could go mad; my magic could backfire on me. And yet, as I have fought, that didn't feel true.

  It made me wonder ... were the kitsune-tsukai full of shit?

  Tossing the katana in my right hand up, I caught the blade and then launched myself forward, using the hilt to hit Revel in the side of the head. If she hadn't been possessed, she'd have dropped; I knew exactly how to hit a bitch to knock her out. Instead, all I got was a split in the skin above her ear and a trickle of blood.

  There was a reason the goddess had wanted Revel here, wasn't there? A miko was much easier to possess—and much more powerful when possessed—than a regular kitsune.

  Throwing my weapons down, I grasped the sides of Revel's face while she was still bound in place, and thrust every ounce of magic I had into her. I couldn't see her expression because of the mask, but the scream she let out shattered my skull. I felt blood leaking out from both my fox and my human ears. Still, I held on, pushing magic into her until I felt Aika being thrust out.

  The ethereal form of the goddess was much the same as the mutated Fox Father and the wolves I'd seen in the caves, twisted and unrecognizable from her true self. With a sob, Revel collapsed and I caught her, but just barely. When her knees hit the stone, Aika grasped her by a handful of red hair and yanked her away, pulling her from my arms.

  The goddess' twisted face snarled at me, letting out a shriek that reminded me oddly of Ziff, trapped back at the bottom of the hill in the SUV. She slid right back into Revel's body before I could do a damn thing about it. This time, she was so fast that I wasn't even able to grab my swords before she was clamping her hand around my throat and squeezing.

  Revel's beautiful red nails dug into my skin as I kicked out and hit her as hard as I could in the stomach. May as well have been kicking a brick wall for all the good it did. I clawed at her eyes, her arms, but I couldn't get the pressure to stop.

  I was suffocating.

  My last ditch effort was to shift into fox form.

  Fortunately, I was able to slide through her hand and land on all fours.

  "Thea!" Mikhail grabbed me by the tails and yanked me out of the way as Revel smashed her katanas into the stone where I'd been standing. He tucked me against his chest as Bennett threw out a punch that knocked Revel's head back so far, I was afraid he'd killed her.

  "We can't leave her here!" I snarled as I shifted back and Mikhail began to drag me toward the steps again.

  "We can, and we goddamn will," he said, throwing me over his shoulder. Bennett did nothing to stop him, and Nix was already waiting on the second step down. As Mik took off for the stairs, I saw five more gods approaching from the building in the back of the temple, making their way slowly but ominously toward us.

  That made eight.

  Eight of Inari's nine lovers, infected.

  Fuck.

  We didn't stand a chance.

  As we went for the staircase this time, the goddess let us pass, her invisible barrier gone. But as we moved past her, she reached out and brushed her fingers along my tails, stealing my magic away yet again, cutting me off from it so abruptly that I almost passed out.

  The last thing I saw as Mik took off down the stairs was Revel, her red hair billowing in the wind, the fox mask skewed on her beautiful face.

  This is all my fault. I brought her to the US, brought her to the temple. It's my fault she's infected.

  I knew then that I'd do whatever it took to save her.

  Whatever it fucking took.

  Even if it meant agreeing to the Earth's ridiculous demands so that I could get my magic back. Because if I came here without it, I wouldn't stand a chance. Hell, I didn't stand a chance now. Yet I knew I had to try. How could I leave Revel up here like this? If the disease didn't drive her mad, the possession eventually would. That was a fucking fact.

  So.

  If I had to marry Fin, I'd do it. Because I needed him back, and I needed to find Riot, and I sure as hell wasn't going to be able to accomplish the impossible without my magic.

  Thea Hunt, the youngest kitsune to ever have nine tails, and I couldn't even use them.

  I'd be damned if I was going to go down in history as a failure ... or a pushover.

  For now, I'd agree to whatever the council wanted, but with a vampire, an alpha werewolf, and a skinwalker at my side, I sure as hell didn't think things had to stay that way.

  If the kitsune-tsukai wanted a fight, they'd get one.

  And I was going to kick their asses.

  To Be Continued…

  Foxfire Burning Book #2, Coming Soon.

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  The Wild Hunt Motorcycle Club Book One

  Spirited by C.M. Stunich.

  Flip the page for an excerpt of chapter one.

  Chapter One

  Brynn

  The instrument of my own destruction loomed above me, casting a long shadow in the bloodred rays of a dying sun. Its crumbling facade was decorated with a morbid metaphor of a face—soulless eyes, a gaping mouth, tangled green locks. Okay, so I was exaggerating the broken windows, the front entrance with its missing doors, and the cluster of wild blackberries that had morphed into a monster of their own making, but come on: the former Grandberg Manor was bust.

  “This is the place?” I asked, hoisting my equipment up on one shoulder and eyeing the crumbling old house with a raised brow. “It looks half-ready to collapse. You know me—if there's an even the slightest opportunity that I might trip, I will. Just be honest: am I going to fall straight through the floor?”

  “Probably,” Jasinda said, moving around me and over the twisted, rusted remains of the front gate. Once upon a time, this place was crawling with nobility from around the world, and its gardens … even the drawings were enough to make my mother's green thumb well, green with envy. “Air and I have a bet going on whether or not you'll make it out of here alive.”

  She thew a smirk over her shoulder at me and I pursed my lips.

  Jasinda and Air were always making bets about me despite the fact that Air was the flubbing prince and shouldn't be making bets with anyone, let alone my handler. I had to admit though: if there was anyone around that was worth betting on, it was me.

  First off, I was a half-angel which meant I could see spirits. And second, I was a half-human which meant those spirits actually deigned to communicate with me. A full-blooded angel was too haughty and highbrow to give any ghost the time of day, and a full-blooded human couldn't see one if they tried.

  This special ability of mine did end up getting me into heaps of trouble. For example, there was that one time I followed a ghost straight into the queen's chambers and found her, um, indisposed with the head of the royal guard who, you know, also just happened to be my mother.

  Then of course, there was the fact that I had the small, slight frame of my mother's desert dwelling ancestors but the wide,
heavy span of wings from my father's side. Let's just be frank and say I toppled over a lot. Oh, and I ended up having long, in-depth conversations with people who weren't really people but were, in fact, very tricky ghosts. Even my first kiss had been with a spirit.

  I took a deep breath of the cool, lavender scented air and followed after Jas, tripping and cursing in my own made up language.

  “Go flub yourself,” I growled at a thick tangle of blackberry that had gotten wrapped around my ankle. “You bleeding blatherer.”

  “Are you making words up again?” Jas said, parking her hands on her hips and sighing at me. “Can't you just say you bleeding bastard like everyone else? And don't even get me started on you using the work flub instead of fuc—”

  “Hey!” I snapped, putting my palm over her lips with one hand and pointing at myself with the other. “Half-angel over here. Just hearing somebody use a word with an extreme negative connotation makes me lose a feather.”

  “Oh, please,” Jas said, pushing my hand away from her full red lips and smirking at me as I tried to rub her makeup off on my breeches. “That's a myth and you know it. Air told me that when you were kids, he used to chase you around the castle saying damn and bastard and the like, just to see if you'd lose any feathers—you didn't.”

  I narrowed my eyes on her as she turned and headed up what was once an impressive flight of marble steps, now cracked and chipped like an old beggar's teeth. I shivered and followed after her, examining the red stain on my palm that stunk like copperberries. A lot of women painted their mouths with the stuff, but to me that fragrant floral scent was tinged with a metallic sting, like copper. Like blood. Thus, the name—copperberries.

  As I hurried up the steps, I kept my eyes on the decaying black facade of the manor, all its intricate moldings and details stripped away by time and rain, the harsh winds that curled across this part of the kingdom in summer.

  “Let's do a quick walkthrough and see if you can't sense any residual energies,” Jas suggested as I set my black leather satchel on the floor and knelt beside it. The ground around me was littered with debris—leaves, twigs, bits of crumbling plaster, a dead mouse.

  “Oh, that's flubbing sick,” I whispered as I caught sight of the creature's spirit hovering nearby, its furred sides almost completely translucent as it took long, heaving breaths. Of course, the mouse didn't need to breathe anymore, but it didn't know that.

  I pulled a dagger from the sheath on my belt—please Goddess, don't actually ask me to use this thing in combat—and prodded at the mouse's body with the jeweled hilt.

  Fresh blood stained the white leather pommel and made me shiver.

  “Jas,” I started, because a long dead carcass was one thing, but a fresh one? Hell's bells—since Hell was an actual place it didn't count as a curse word so no lost feathers for me—but I hoped it was just a cat that had taken the rodent's life and not … something else.

  “Brynn, you need to see this!” Jas shouted and I sighed, wiping the mouse's blood on the already dirty leg of my breeches and tucking it away. Before I stood up, I clasped the silver star hanging around my neck with one hand and reached out to touch the mouse's spirt with the other. The poor thing was too scared to even shy away, its soul becoming briefly corporeal as my fingers made contact with its fur.

  “Goddess-speed and happy endings,” I whispered as the image of the mouse morphed and shivered, turning as silver as a beam of moonlight and fading away until there was nothing there but the warped and rotted boards of the old floor.

  I stood up, leaving my satchel where it was on the ground and rubbing my shoulder as I followed the sound of Jasinda's voice. The road up to the manor was riddled with broken cobblestones, weeds, and the skeletons of long abandoned carriages. It was too rough for any sort of pack animal to make the trek, so we'd had to carry ourselves on foot, lugging all the equipment that a spirit whisperer—that's me—might need to exorcise a ghost or two or ten.

  “Jassy?” I asked as I moved past the formal foyer with its double staircases, and down a long receiving hall that would've been used by servants in times past. The wallpaper was peeling like old skin, leaving behind water stained walls and flaky plaster. At some point, thieves had come in and stripped the old place of its wood moldings, sconces and chandeliers; they'd left nothing but a skeleton behind.

  “In here!” she called out, drawing me through an empty archway where a swinging door might've once stood and into the kitchen. As I moved, I was conscious of keeping my wings tucked tightly against my back. My clumsiness was not limited to my feet. I was notorious among the castle staff for breaking things with the feathered black wings that graced my back. As a kid, they used to call me Pigeon Girl because I caused ten times as much damage to the royal halls as the flying rats that plagued the old stone building.

  “What is it?” I asked as I leaned against the wall outside a small servant's room—a tiny square that would've belonged to the head cook. “Jas, there was a mouse—”

  “Flub mice,” she said, only she didn't actually say flub but I wouldn't lose a feather even thinking about the F-word that famously rhymes with duck. As a half-angel, my powers were bound to the light goddess and she was a serious stickler for avoiding words with negative connotations. I supposed I couldn't blame her; the very words I spoke held power. The more positivity and light I imbued those words with, the more powerful I was. “Look at this, Brynn. There's a distinct spiritual signature written all over this room.”

  The room itself was so small that with the collapsed remains of a small bed and a sagging dresser, there wasn't space for us both. I waited for Jas to step out, pushing her long dark hair over her shoulder, sapphire blue eyes sparkling with a scholar's excitement.

  “Brynn, this could be it,” she said as I took a deep breath and stepped into the room. “Our big break.”

  Jas was always looking for that one case, that one unique spirit that we could exorcise that would prove our worth to the scholars at the Royal College. In just two weeks, I'd be turning twenty-one and that'd be it; that was the cut off date for acceptance into the prestigious training facility. It wasn't that Jas cared about the status of being a student there, or the potential for a high-ranking position after graduation, it was the library. Only students of the Royal College were permitted to use the vast, twisting hallways of the catacombs. There were books there that couldn't be found anywhere else—not to mention ancient artifacts, exemplary professors, and vast resources that could be used for research.

  It was Jasinda's dream, even if it wasn't mine. I hoped she was right; I hoped this was it.

  I stepped over a small hole in the floor and into the tiny windowless room.

  As soon as I did, it hit me, the pressure of an angry spirit, bearing down on me with the cold burn of something long dead and waiting. Waves of icy winter chill tore across my skin like knives, despite the warm evening air that permeated the rest of the building. Whatever this was, it was powerful.

  I grasped the silver star at my throat and closed my eyes.

  “Haversey,” I whispered, invoking the name of the light goddess.

  If I were Jas, I knew what I'd be seeing: a girl shrouded in silver moonlight, her tanned skin pearlescent and shimmering, her hair as white as snow lifted in an unnatural breeze.

  I opened my eyes slowly and bit back a gasp.

  Every inch of the walls was covered in the word Hellim, the name of the dark god. What I had originally thought were decorative splotches on the wallpaper were actually his name, written in blood a thousand times over. It had been impossible to see in the dim half-light, but now that I had my second sight open, the letters glowed with a strong, angry spiritual signature.

  I started to take a step back when my foot went through the hole in the floor, and the rotting boards around me creaked and toppled into a black pit below.

  “Brynn!”

  Jas screamed my name as I fell through cold shadow and frost, hitting the soggy wet earth with a grun
t and a crack of pain in my shoulder that almost immediately went numb. That was bad, really bad. Pain was one thing, but numbness meant that what'd just happened to me could be really serious.

  I tried to stand up, but my arm gave out and I found myself lying in a mound of decaying wet leaves and dirt, the scent of rot thick and cloying in the air.

  As I blinked to try and orient myself to the darkness, I felt a cold hand on my shoulder and a gust of icy breath at my ear.

  When I turned, I found myself looking into the face of a handsome—and very angry—spirit.

  His lips curved up in a smile meant to disarm me.

  “Boo,” he whispered as he reached out and pushed my dislocated shoulder back into place.

  White-hot pain crashed over my vision and I passed out.

  The Vixen's Lead by Tate James.

  Flip the page for an Excerpt of chapter one

  Chapter One

  In the background, the shadowy outline of a naked woman haunted a painting of lilies. The rich imagery held me captive. Reportedly the work was worth a few hundred thousand dollars, but I couldn’t decide if it was because of the image or the person who painted it. Maybe both. Whatever the reason, the Beverly Hills gallery had it on its walls, which meant it was without a doubt expensive.

  “Nine minutes and thirty-four seconds until security systems are back online. Stop gawking at the paintings and hurry the fuck up!”

  How the hell had Lucy known what I was doing? Our comms were audio only. Still, Lucy had a point. I left the painting and crept down the corridor on silent feet. At the end a large, open room held several ostentatious pieces of jewelry displayed in glass cases on pedestals. They were part of a colored diamond showcase in which the wealthy allowed their prized possessions to be displayed for the common folk to drool over. It was a clear night, and the full moon streamed light through the windows. The moonlight refracted against the jewels and created a rainbow of Christmas lights in the darkness.